On June 27, he and Steven Frehn, a mechanical engineer, will open Creator, a San Francisco burger shop where a robot preps, cooks and assembles your meal. Creator is betting that robotic efficiency and consistency, combined with techniques borrowed from Michelin-star chefs, will lead to a better burger--for the relatively affordable price of $6. The restaurant is designed with the muted colors and clean lines of a luxury home-goods store. All the better to focus on the real stars: two 14-foot-long burger-making machines, each comprised of roughly 7,000 parts, including hundreds of sensors. Buns, tomatoes, onions, pickles, seasonings and sauces are stored in clear tubes, which sit over a copper conveyor belt on a wooden base carved into Zaha-Hadid-style swooping lines.

This is part of CNET's "Dining Redefined" series about how technology is changing the way you eat. When someone says "robot restaurant," I first think of an LED and laser show at a Tokyo venue where remote-controlled robots dance with bikini-clad girls in a sensory show that accompanies dinner. But the reality of robot restaurants is generally way more pedestrian and low-key. One example is Eatsa, the San Francisco-based restaurant company that takes orders through iPads and dispenses meals through automated machines. Until now, Eatsa has been using this tech to serve up quinoa bowls to health-food fans in its own restaurants.

The next time you open the door to find the pizza you ordered (via an app of course), you may not find a delivery person standing on your doorstep. Expect to see a drone dropping off your dinner. And perhaps that dinner was by prepped, at least in part, by robots. Eventually, some of your pizza's toppings may be lab grown-- but in the meantime, even those fresh-off-the-farm ingredients have a good chance of reaching your fork via robotics. Today, automation is shaping up to be our generation's food revolution.

Customers use interactive kiosks to place orders at Eatsa, a fully automated fast food restaurant in San Francisco. Customers use interactive kiosks to place orders at Eatsa, a fully automated fast food restaurant in San Francisco. Much of the anger and anxiety in the 2016 election is fueled by the sense that economic opportunity is slipping away for many Americans. This week, as part of NPR's collaborative project with member stations, A Nation Engaged, we're asking the question: What can be done to create economic opportunity for more Americans? When we talk about the economy, we spend a lot of time talking about jobs -- how to create more of them and how to replace the ones being lost.

Justin Sullivan/GettyEatsa is San Francisco's fully automated fast food restaurant where orders appear in a cubby. At San Francisco's first fully automated restaurant, meals appear in little glass cubbies, just 90 seconds after customers order and pay on wall-mounted iPads. It's a human-less experience – no waitstaff, no cashier, no one to get your order wrong and no one to tip. The moment before the meal appears, the see-through display screen that fronts the cubbies goes black for the few seconds when you might catch sight of the hand that feeds you. Eatsa has not yet achieved total automation.

At San Francisco's first fully automated restaurant, meals appear in little glass cubbies, just 90 seconds after customers order and pay on wall-mounted iPads. It's a human-less experience – no waitstaff, no cashier, no one to get your order wrong and no one to tip. The moment before the meal appears, the see-through display screen that fronts the cubbies goes black for the few seconds when you might catch sight of the hand that feeds you. Eatsa has not yet achieved total automation. The company admits it employs a small kitchen staff, and one employee is present in the front of the house, answering questions about how to order and dodging questions about what's going on behind the wall of magic cubbies.